(Closed) Work Dilemma – Asking for a Transfer

Hi Bees… looking for some advice! I’ll try to summarize this as best I can.

Darling Husband and I bought a house in November of last year, making my daily commute to work 50+ minutes one way so I began searching for another job. I was hired at a firm 20 minutes closer to home making my commute only 30 minutes one way. (Both jobs I was/am a paralegal)

Well, my new job is dull… SO INCREDIBLY BORING. I’m focusing on only one thing (timeshare foreclosures) whereas in my last job, I was doing many different things in corporate law. I enjoyed my job for the most part even though some of the people there were impossible to deal with (another reason I wanted to get out of there). I enjoyed the variety of the job and how busy I was.

I’ve been working at my new job for a little less than two months and already looking for new jobs. I was just informed, however, a position has opened up in the same town I used to work in at the firm I work for now.

My question is – is it super tacky to ask for a transfer this early in my new job? I feel bad, but this just isn’t for me. The other job I would be going back to what I used to do which I enjoyed. It stinks I would have to go back to the long commute but I could tolerate it I think.

Or should I stay where I am and continue to look for new jobs all together? I’m currently in the process of finishing my bachelors degree in business and I’m hoping to get out of law all together once I’m finished. I’ve applied to a few jobs but I have a feeling the fact that I’m only 1.5 months in to my new job and I’m already looking for a different job is kind of a red flag for employers.

True story: I’m a feild engineer for a major software company, and there’s only so many people in the US and even in the world who know our software, even as a customer. Everyone in this little segment of the industry knows everyone else, plain as that. We might not know each other well, but we at least know people’s names and where they’ve worked over the years.

One day we had an opening on my team, and my manager asked me to help him review some resumes. One was from a fella whose name everyone knew, and while he had a reputation for being a smart, hard-working guy, he also had a long history of changing jobs frequently. I think he’d had about 5 postions in the previous 4 years. My manager commented on that, and I replied “Yeah our nickname for him is The Happy Job Hopper” because he’s always jumping from job to job. We put him in the Reject pile without even giving him the interview.

A year or two later I actually finally met this fella in person, and we got to be good friends. He got to talking about why he’d left his most recent position, and the whole job history came out: one company he’d worked for laid everyone off after they lost a big contract; the next had some serious problems in the Accounting department and it took them over 4 months to reimburse him for travel expenses; one had promised him full-time hourly work but ended up only working him about 40 hours a month and he couldn’t afford to feed his family on that; and so on, so on. Every single job he’d left, he’d left for a very good reason, and one that was fully out of his control. He never once went jumping for greener pastures. And he was absolutely the smartest guy from our batch of resumes– I was wishing I could go back in time and hire him instead of the jerk we ended up with! But we didn’t even bother to interview him, because on paper, he looked like the kind of guy who would always have one foot out the door.

Moral of the story: really bad idea to move around too often in your career, especially if you’re in a small industry or a small town. Once you get tagged as a job-hopper, it’s really hard to lose that reputation. If you make a move now, make sure it is to a stable position in a stable company and plan on sticking with it for at least 2 years (longer tenure to make up for your current short-tenure gig), even if it’s just an internal transfer, no matter how badly it sucks.

@fishbone: Ughhh that’s my biggest fear. I’ve had 4 jobs in five years but like him, always had a good reason to leave. The first was an internship so it was only temporary; the second we moved 16 hours away so Darling Husband could take a job; and the third I left because I thought my current one had more opportunity… WRONG! I considering asking for my old job back but I don’t know. So frustrating.. I figured I’d be happy in my career by now!

Yeah if you’ve moved around that much in the last few years, I’d seriously consider sucking it up and enduring the boring job for at least a year, maybe even two. There will *always* be another opportunity on the horizon, especially for a paralegal. You really don’t want to get branded a job-hopper this soon in your career.

@MrsTillerResq: I tend to agree with fishbone on this one. I recently was approved for an office transfer, but I had been with the company for a year and am planning on staying in the new office for another year to avoid seeming flakey.